Les Powles is probably best known as the man who, through a error in navigation, ended up in Brazil rather than the Caribbean he was originally heading for. And this is a shame as he is, in fact, a first rate yachtsman who, in more than twenty years of sailing, circumnavigated the world three times, once nonstop. What makes this even more remarkable is that he did not start until he was in his fifties, built his own boat and essentially learned sailing as he went along.

He is the man who has actually done what, I am sure, many of us have dreamed of at one stage or another. There is a reason why he has done it and most of us have not and Powles knows why:

By now I had reached the stage where people began to say, ‘It must be great to own your own yacht and sail around the world. I’d love to do the same but….’

‘But’ is always the crunch. Invariably it would be followed by ‘I’m still paying the mortgage’ or ‘ the wife’s not keen’ or ‘the cats have had kittens’. If people were honest with themselves, they would admit they led a contented life and had no reason to change it.

Which is why you and I will never undertake the journeys Powles did, and if you were honest with yourself after reading this book you will be glad that you didn’t.

When Powles started out on his first circumnavigation he had little experience and little money. He quickly gained experience but money was always a problem and it was this lack of money that did cause him a number of difficulties. Food was always in short supply and as he didn’t have the money for a full suite of sails his journeys always took longer than they should and so the shortage of food would become critical. For example at the end of both his second, nonstop, circumnavigation and his final circumnavigation (under taken when he was 70, by the way) he had run out of food and had been on short rations for long periods and had lost a lot of weight. So much so that people were shocked at his appearance.

As well as the food problems, he also had his fair share of foul weather and his descriptions of the storms, during the first of which he spent days doing little more than hanging on and pumping out the yacht’s bilges, and others where the yacht was knocked down are vivid and he gets across the sheer awfulness of a suffering a storm in a small boat very well. I have been in gales, and on occasions storms but mainly on large merchant ships and they were grim enough. On the odd occasion I have been out in rough weather in a yacht, it was never anywhere near as bad as the weather experienced by Powles in the Southern Ocean.

After three circumnavigations, Les Powles continued sailing, and was at sea in a gale on his 80th birthday.

I had never known the boat so wet; charts became soaked and fell apart. With the vibration and shaking it became difficult to boil water for a hot drink. On October 24th it was my 80th birthday and I managed to celebrate with a cup of tea.

This remarkable man still lives on board his beloved Solitaire and his book is a cracking read. Highly recommended.

The William Price in this novel is the brother of Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the events of this book take place after end of Mansfield Park. The book itself if split into two separate tales. The first has Price joining the Thrush as a newly promoted lieutenant and going with her to tackle the Americans. The second takes Price and the Thrush to the Irish coast to deal with some rebels and an American privateer schooner.

There were a couple of problems for me. One was that every one, apart from the unfortunate Midshipman Ffarquar, was a little bit too nice, a little too precious, a little too goody-two-shoes. This is especially true of Price himself, although given who his sister was, that might have been what the author was aiming at.  Secondly, perhaps I have read too many of these novels and should be a little less picky, but I seemed to spend a little too much time spotting anachronisms or thinking ‘no, it wouldn’t have happened like that’. I doubt, for example, that a newly joined officer would be allowed to loiter in his quarters whilst the ship got underway, or that the Captain would leave the business of getting underway to the First Lieutenant, especially when both were new to the vessel. Nor do I think that a Midshipman would address a Lieutenant by his first name, even if they were friends. Of course, I could be wrong and it’s just me being too picky, but all in all it did distract it me a little to much and I found myself looking for nits to pick rather than just enjoying the read.

Fortunately, in this case the name of the hero or the fact that he is a character from another author’s book didn’t distract me as it did with ‘Flashman and the Seawolf’. I don’t know really know why that did bother me, especially as there is a whole industry of novels featuring the characters created by others. ‘Death Comes to Pemberly’ springs to mind, and that was a good read, to say nothing ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’. Great title if nothing else. Who wouldn’t want to at least take a look at a book with a title like that? Bit it did.

Anyway, back to the point. William Price and the ‘Thrush’  whilst it has its moments, also had, for me at least, some problems. Mind you, at 77 pence for the Kindle edition, it’s more than worth taking a look.

One for the yotties.

Skipper vs Crew, Crew vs Skipper explains and illustrates the clashes, quarrels and contests between a yacht skipper and his crew. If you have ever sailed on a yacht or are even thinking about going sailing on someone’s yacht this is the book for you. The book is unusual in that you can start from both ends. Start from the front and learn how as a skipper you should handle with the bunch of misfits you are lumbered with as crew. Start from the back and learn how as crew you handle the lunatic egomaniac who owns the boat who considers himself to be the best thing since Nelson.

It also reflect the world as it is, rather than the glossy magazines would have you believe. Rather than the articles you get in some magazines, a magazine for the ordinary sad incompetents would have, according to Tim Davison, articles with titles such as ‘Face it, you’re a bodger’ and ‘Zen and the art of ignoring osmosis’.

The book, in other words, tells it like it is.

Richard Woodman’s five volume ‘A History of the British Merchant Navy’ is a fine body of work and is recommended to anyone interested in the subject and they deserve to be read as a whole. The series sits alongside N.A.M. Rodger’s two (shortly to be three) volume history of the Royal Navy on my shelves. However, if you were to read only one of them I would say go for the final volume ‘Fiddler’s Green: The Great Squandering 1921-2010’ and for two reasons. Firstly it gives the reader a good, if brief, overview of the work of the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, and secondly it chronicles the catastrophic and probably terminal decline of the Merchant Navy.

Knowing that I was going to right a brief review, I was marking interesting passages with little post-it notes and by the time I got to the end the book was festooned with little bits of yellow paper marking interesting passages and the review could have ended up a lot, lot longer than it needed to be. The book is crammed full of interesting stories – from piracy off the China coast in the 1920′s to the voyage of the tanker Hopemount through the North-East passage to the longitude of 134 East in the summer of 1943, to say nothing of some of the epic lifeboat voyages made in horrendous conditions by the surviving crews of torpedoed merchant ships and the sterling work done by the Merchant Navy during the Falklands War.

The heroic work of the Merchant Navy during WWII is well known and well recorded, not least by Woodman in his series of books on the  North Atlantic, Arctic and Malta Convoys, so it was the history of the decline of the Merchant Navy that was of most interest to me. This is something that is not well enough known as it deserves to be.

To me, as a cadet and then a junior officer in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s it seemed to be a swift, almost overnight, decline but that was not the case. Whilst the end was indeed swift it was a long time coming and as well as telling the story of that decline Woodman details the reasons for it – a conservative management, recalcitrant unions, a failure to adapt to new technology, the end of the British Empire and governments that failed to understand or support the industry.

In 1975 the Merchant Navy reached a post-war peak of 1,614 ships, in 1980 the fleet was down to 1,143 ships and by 1985 that figure was down to 627. With fantastic timing my cadetship lasted from 1977 to 1981, just when the Merchant Navy was going into terminal decline and yet it was only in the final year (when I realised that I was not going to walk into a 3rd Mate’s post with the tanker company I was training with) that I was really aware of it at all and once I started looking for a job I became very, very aware of the problem.

Woodman makes the very valid point that this decline was not inevitable – it did not have to happen and Britain could still have a viable Merchant Navy. It did not need to be this way, but enough of my moaning. Even if this of no real interest, the book is an excellent conclusion to detailed history of the Merchant Navy. Fiddler’s Green is only available as a hard back and isn’t available in a cheap format, but you should be able to pick up a copy for under £20, and I would strongly recommend that you do.